


your arrows fly with bitter aim

by VesperRegina



Category: Galileo (TV Japan)
Genre: 30kisses, AU, Angst, F/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 00:31:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VesperRegina/pseuds/VesperRegina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waiting too long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your arrows fly with bitter aim

**Author's Note:**

> For Paula, who said, "by the time [Yukawa] finally gets the extent of his admiration and attachment toward Utsumi across his corpus collosum from right to left, she could be retired from police work, sending kids off to college, and away traveling with her husband." That provided inspiration for this, but it's not a direct fulfillment of it. 30 Kisses prompt: "fence."

"Your hair is short," he says. He expects her to bridle, but all Utsumi does is flick her eyes to the side, without turning her head. The smile that touches her mouth, as brief as a break in cloud shadow, doesn't seem to be meant for him, and her attention returns to the menu high on the wall.

The line isn't long. She moves off to the side after they order, and she falls into reverie, while he catalogs details: the absent-minded tapping of her fingers at the opening of her purse -- it's smaller than it used to be; personal, therefore, and not for work -- pulled close under her arm; the feathered curve of the ends of her hair, caressing her shoulders with even the slightest movement of her head; the hint of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, that speak of smiles that he's never seen. 'You still drink that awful coffee, don't you, Professor?' she'd asked over the phone. 'If we're to meet, you should let me get what I want.' Several years gone, association ended, in a tapering off of interaction, and then this call of hers.

"Professor?" Her amusement at his expense makes itself known in a tilted smirk, and a lilt to her voice. "Surely you're not still thinking about my hair?"

That smile is still warmer than it should be, as though it is tempered with a fond indulgence. Here are the years he's missed, there is her spirit and warmth: the depth and vibrancy of fire. 

"People change," she continues. "I wasn't going to keep the same hair style all my life."

She reaches past him, the crown of her head all he sees, and he feels vertigo crawl up his spine, a shift in the gravity around them, and then she waves the green plastic-wrapped straw she's acquired below his nose. "Even you, Professor, are getting older."

He doesn't move as she leans in again, and peers up at him with purposeful wide eyes, and satisfaction on her lips, though his nostrils flare in response. She has, in one moment, turned from known to strange. She says, "New frames; stronger prescription. Am I right?" 

This Utsumi bristles with arrogance and disregard for personal space. Disquiet boils within him, even as he doesn't back down, as he asks, "What are you doing?" A flicker of her eyelashes; a darting aside of her eyes, and a dropping away of her amusement, regained again with insouciance: these are not hard to understand on their own. Together, they make no sense.

"Waiting for my coffee. Like you."

It appears that time has filed her to sharp points. He fears that if he looks at his hands that he will find pinpricks of blood.

Her name is called; chased by his. She walks away; expects him to follow.

She tucks her hair behind her ear as she sits and fiddles with her straw. It's a weather-change -- indecision casting down misty plumes from an emptying cloud, grey and distant -- and he sits across from her with wary silence. Late-morning sunlight slants across the table, the shadow from her cup long and dark, and when he sits, the heat is strong on his shoulders, intensified by the large clear windows. Perhaps this is the reason he thinks of a conversation long ago, of remarking on the EPR paradox, and her utter incomprehension. Perhaps it has nothing to do with that; perhaps it's just a misfire of memory.

"So much time has passed since we last spoke, hasn't it, Professor? I think I'm surprised that -- that --" She closes her mouth and waves her hand before her face. At a loss to continue. If this is her feeling sorry for her antagonism, it's not enough.

"It's natural that you're finding it difficult to talk; we never did have much in common." The comment tastes acerbic on his tongue. It doesn't sting her like he intended it; she only nods, somber, much more like he remembered her. He places his hand over the safety cap of his coffee; something to do with his hands, something to look at that isn't her face.

Memory is poor, cluttered by perceptual distortion, even in the short term, and he's only deluding himself. She was always less deferential with him than with anyone else, always ready with a sharp opinion. He came to appreciate it; such honesty was rare, and with that appreciation had come hard-won understanding of each other. She'd made him work for every second of rapport; intriguing to the last. He curves his hands around his cup -- the warmth of it suggests that he would be better off letting it sit. He has no desire to have sensation be stripped from his tongue because he was too unwise to wait.

Utsumi pushes her cup aside, and it scrapes the table, a noise that cuts through his focus, a note of harshness in the awkward hum of tension between them.

Her jaw tightens; she's aware of it as well, and whatever prompted her actions earlier seems to have been killed without a whimper. Now all that's left is a regret that strains the pleasantness of her face, pulls at the edges of it with an undefinable grief.

She says, "I have something to tell you, and I don't know how you'll receive it, but you should know it first-hand. Not through Kuribayashi or Kusanagi or anyone else we know."

"Why would it matter, if I learned of it through them?"

"Because... because we were friends, right?"

"Were," he repeats, caught in the meaning, the distancing finality of a past action. There is, then, in her mind, a determinate, unobservable to him. He is the undetermined, and his action incalculable. 

She moves, stretches her hands flat on the table before him, then lifts one and hooks her fingers around a thin silver chain around her neck, and pulls; light coruscates from a hoop: delicate, bright, breath-taking. There's honey in his throat, but it is not sweet.

She turns the ring up, the gem a-glimmer. "I always thought I'd be alone, like you, Professor. Always too busy, too absorbed, too strange and unapproachable. Not much time to forge a relationship when in a career like mine. It was like...."

She licks her lips, places the opening of the ring over the tip of her finger and then removes it. "It was like I was a cat, kept inside, always staring out the window, wanting to get loose and climb fences, but always knowing I would go back home. I think I would have been happy either way, but now --" She looks across the ring to him, sighs, and lets it drop. "Do you have anything to say?"

"You're happy," he hears himself say, flat and dead.

"Yes. I am." Her voice is vivid, as though she's only just realized it herself. "I never talked about any of the men I dated, so this is unexpected, isn't it? It was never anything you would have been interested in, after all."

Yukawa tries to swallow, but nothing goes down. He reaches for his coffee. Utsumi says, "Don't burn yourself," and he hesitates, then closes his fingers around it and takes a gulp. It courses down, all heat and no flavor, like swallowing a handful of pebbles left in the sun.

"I'm fine," he says. Her expression is watchful; intent. Was this face the one she showed to her suspects? 

"You'll forgive me if I take that look on your face as contrary to what's come out of your mouth. I know you better than that." She's lifted her chin, arched her eyebrows, but two high spots of color show clearly through her skin, in the suffused light, and she breathes like she's aware of every pull and release.

"Yes," he says, and looks away. "I think you did."

She puts her hand beside his cup. It would, he imagines, be as comforting as his coffee; as torturous as the heat of it spilled. She hides her ring on a chain around her neck; how sensible of her, to keep it from being lost. He asks, "Are you leaving your work?" 

"No. I can have both. It will be difficult."

He nods; the motion is minimal, stiff. 

"I used to think that marriage would prove a fence I couldn't climb. I used to think you --"

"People change," he says, taking refuge in repetition, as he feels the settling of a mask on his face, the detached impassivity others have always seen as coldness, and he's always known to be a defense mechanism. She speaks of fences, but she says she's free.

A corner of her mouth lifts -- almost-mirth, a ghost of amusement. She looks down and presses her lips together, swallowing. Something struck; a little hurt: a paltry reward. She curls the fingers of her hand on the table, then withdraws it, turning her head to the window, and covering her mouth.

She nods, after a moment, and looks at him again.

"Yes, and grow apart and find others to value. Not everyone is meant to marry, though? Right? Cupid's lead arrows don't always lose their power. Ah, but that's just fanciful nonsense, isn't it? Forget I said that."

She waves her hand again, wiping away the comment. She leans back and tucks the ring away. Her hands are nimble; her fingers efficient. She would be a good mother: cool under pressure, and able to soothe injuries with patience and that same efficiency, speaking soft words all the while. She would pick splinters out with firm mercy.

"It's time that I should be leaving," he says, and stands, out of the way of the sunlight, which floods her face. She follows his motion with her head, sparing herself a momentary blinding, but she still blinks, looking up at him. She doesn't attempt to shade her face. Now that he's no longer in the path of the light limning her, he feels unforgivably cold. "I wish you well."

"So soon?"

"I have --"

"It's okay. You don't need to explain, but wait, I'll follow you out. Here --" she reaches for his cup, and closes her fingers around his, an accident of timing needling up through his veins, her touch inciting panic response: a wave of immediate fight-flee-freeze. Utsumi -- Utsumi chooses the second, snatching her hand away.

At work within him is a gear, turning in groans, slow agonizing movement, and a working brittleness on the verge of shattering; glass and rust, and the imminent peril of exposure. The third option -- that was his body's choice, not his, not the conscious choice of a mind graphing possible outcomes.

The result of entanglement -- there is a horizon of possibility caught there in the stillness of this moment, the eventual extinguishing of everything they ever meant to each other. If only he could pull free of it, turn his back to her wide-eyed face, to the naïveté of her understanding, to reject the lie in her appearance that has made her the image of Utsumi of old, astounded by his revelations.

She changed, and so did he, and now the choices are gone.

She breathes, blinks, and if he were to bend down, were to put his mouth to hers, to share the heat of her life, then it would not be done in love, but in revenge.

Jealousy tastes like bile. He knew this already, but eating it because of her? 

He says, "No," and takes his container from the table. "I don't want this anymore."

A flash of shock over her face, and she stands, but he only sees this in his peripheral vision, already tossing away the coffee, and though he's aware she's come up to him, aware that she's expecting something else -- social niceties of dismissal, a final end to this -- the necessity of it is galling and impossible.

She follows him out, and the breeze outside belies the warmth inside the shop, cuts close into every part of him that hasn't yet been hurt. She stands in his path, makes him stop, demands his attention.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

"Nothing," he answers. 

"You're upset."

"Not for any reasons that matter now." 

She clasps her hands across her middle -- one hand held in the tight grasp of the other, her eyes going wide. She's uneasy, and he's... 

Drained. That's what he is. It settles on him like the embrace of humidity and heat from a sauna -- sticky and asphyxiating. He says, "If I had heard it from anyone else, it wouldn't have mattered, nor does it now. You've told me you're getting married, to, undoubtedly, someone trustworthy and capable. I wouldn't expect anything less from someone like you." 

He sells it well; her face relaxes, with each word, but each word takes something from him, a sacrifice of good will, the last bit of affection he ever had for her, given away in a lie. His fingertips are numb and cold.

Her mouth wavers into a hesitant smile, but her hands stay clasped, around the possibility of secrets. It is not for him to coax them released. "I guess I was worried for nothing." 

Her hand twitches, an aborted motion, a lifting of her fingers, and he flinches, a minute involuntary spasm that he tightens his jaw after. She says, "Would you do me a favor, Professor?" 

"I don't think --"

"Please attend. If you ever --" She thins her mouth and looks down; he straightens his spine, and closes his hands into fists, and waits. She looks up, presses on, "If you ever cared for me at all, please come." 

The answer she expects is not one he can give, and the answer he would give is too honest. "I'll consider it. For the sake of what we once were."

"That's all I'm asking, thank you. I'll send you an invitation." 

"Take care."

"I won't keep you," she says.


End file.
